Trust the Longer Journey
my motto, didn't you know?!
A friend and subscriber (thank you Luigi!) asked me how I was trusting the longer journey. I wasn’t sure he was serious. It’s the title of this blog and I say it in nearly every post. It’s the title of my book and, yeah, ok I haven’t published it yet, but it’s also been the motto of my teaching for more than 10 years. “Isn’t it evident?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said.
Hunh.
Just goes to show what GBS (George Bernard Shaw) said so long ago,
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
That’s one of my all-time favorite quotes because it so clearly communicates the pitfall of communication itself—that me saying a thing is not evidence that you’ve received and understood it as I intended. I may think I’m being obvious and don’t need to (over) state it, but just because it’s obvious to me does not mean it’s in any way apparent to you! We need to qualify terms and invite reflexivity in our communications.
Ok, well this is my response to Luigi.
Even before the pithy phrase, it’s been my modus operandi from way back. Even in my Aries-learning-patience-ness there’s been an underlying trust of the longer journey.
You’ve likely heard me tell the story of having to do math calculations in 3rd grade (at the ripe ol’ age of about 9) of what age I would be in the far-off year of 2000. The answer was 27, which became my favorite number and the number on my track and volleyball uniforms, and even on my letterman’s jacket. Yes, I did have a letterman’s jacker, LOL.
About age 13, I bumped my favorite number up by a hundred to 127 when my IQ was tested for Gifted class and it was, you guessed it, 127. Whatever that means. For them it meant I was 3 digits shy of being “gifted”, so I was liminal. I got to go on field trips with them but wasn’t fully in the group otherwise. What else is new?
Looking so far ahead had a profound effect on me. As did looking so far back at my ancient ancestry, something my extended family took enough pride in to keep track of for 13 generations. They even wrote a book cataloguing the family history, or her-story as I prefer to say, that I was given at an extended family reunion in Virginia when I was 8. What a thrill to be listed in a printed book at such a young age!
One of my earliest dreams, that sat couched with two others, like well-balanced gems on a finger ring, was to go back in time to Turtle Island before the white man’s invasion. I wanted to experience the lands and the peoples then, as it felt so real and alive to me in the now. Time travel was a deep desire and Somewhere in Time was a favorite movie. Perhaps still, but that gets us into simultaneous time talk, which I felt then but only knew a term for later on in linear time...
I first started writing poetry when we emerged from the ashram (it was only two weeks but it set the tone for the rest of my life, so be aware of what you expose your kids to at 7 years old!) This was my first poem and no doubt it was heavily influenced by my surroundings and the teachings of Bapuji, a Kundalini master and the guru (and namesake, as his fuller name is Kripalavananda) of Kripalu’s founder, Amrit Desai.
Inner and outer space
is a wondrous place
to be at peace with yourself.
Love is the peace of mind
that binds us together
in outer and inner space as one.
In highschool I wrote longer pieces, but this shorter one brings us back to our focus on trusting the longer journey:
Balance is
Over
Time
Not
In Time.
Highschool felt like a sharp-edged tunnel I had to squeeze my feral amorphous self through. That short poem is evidence of how I managed that extrusion process.
While I did better in Advanced Placement Biology than I did in AP English (and far better in both than Calculus, which I dropped) in my senior year, at university I attempted to narrow my focus to Arts over Sciences. Well, ok, truth be told I was still being extruded and spent my first year at Cornell lobbying to do an Independent Major that would allow me to do it all by making connections across several of their Colleges. Semiotics of Dress is what I called it. Why People Wear What They Wear. And it called on Anthropology, Costume Design, Textile Science and Design, and Art History.
They liked it but since I was also studying Japanese and working two jobs on campus to help pay for my education, I tired of trying to squeeze it down into their requirements. Which was confusing because they wanted to know what my thesis would be, yet they said the complexity of it was too much like a Master’s degree. How could I know my thesis when I hadn’t yet taken the courses?!
At any rate, I tell you all this as an example of how I’ve been trusting the longer journey. I persisted with my interests, moving around the bureaucratic obstacles, by doing the cross-college coursework anyway, but housed under the auspices of a BA in Theatre. My final project in a Textiles class was a fashion show for all body types - my undeclared and unofficial thesis. These days you’d call that a work-around.
Now in grad school I’m learning about geologic time. Like the rocks and sediments I’m studying, I am slow. Our first quiz in Biogeography and Geomorphology and I was bummed to only get 26 out of 40. And then I reframed it. I passed! That’s the main thing. I’m aiming for the longer journey, so I don’t have time to get all emo about one quiz along the way. I let it inform my study methodology for the next quizzes, but I will not pause long enough to let my energy dip as that will jeopardize the longer journey progress.
Trust the Longer Journey came into my lexicon when I started systematizing MYOGA’s Seasons in 2009. It felt too cramped to try to squeeze so much into one class, the way other styles and teachers did. Frenetic. Like babbling heroically to impress someone you might never see again. By trusting the longer journey, I was spreading the detailed yogic inquiry over a whole year and I was trusting that those who practiced with me would experience evolution over time (as Sue says in her testimonial in this post about Seasons).
Evolution is not immediately available to us in time. We can see evidence of it in the moment, but only in relation to past moments, and to the guiding inspiration of imagined future moments. Arrival is another all-time favorite short story and film where the language of the septapods is not linear, but rather all-encompassing, and dreams and deja-vu moments are how the “future” is glimpsed before it’s lived.
How does one see like an eagle, both far afield and in great detail? In the past 10 years I’ve literally been playing with this in my vision. Sharpening my seeing for the distance and then switching quickly to focus on the proximal. Blinking to reset my sight. One woman at a ceremony asked me which bird I would be, so she could give me a feather, and in my consideration of her question she got the answer. When I’m thinking, my gaze goes mid to far distance and my eyes widen with the “looking” for the answer. I remember one student, a lawyer, who would continually insert herself into that field, as though she felt abandoned or was trying to bring me back.
But I can’t see what’s not visible if I’m looking merely at the visible.
In case you’re wondering, it was an eagle.
The spirallic swirl of eagles and other predatory birds, rising on a thermal, inspires the trust the longer journey structure of MYOGA Seasons. Wherever you launch into the practice is where you begin, whether it’s Deepest Winter or First Summer, or any of the other 5 (7 total, correlating to the chakras). Each follows on from the last, building upon what we’ve explored and embodied, to whatever degree we can, in the 7 weeks we have in that MYOGA Season. By the time we spiral around to that same one you first stepped into a year earlier - Deepest Winter or First Summer - it’s not at all the same practice because you’ve evolved.
I equate this to the two experiences I’ve had of hang gliding, which feels more like flying than the falling sensation of parachuting. And flying was another of those dream gems on my finger ring of childhood visions. In hang gliding, just like the birds who don’t eat regularly and need to conserve their energy, we catch a lift on a thermal that spirals up and out over the earth. In my own life, when I’ve found myself in what seems like the same awkward dynamic, embarrassing moment or relational snafu, I’ve learned to take heart. I take this as a sign that I’ve evolved.
By virtue of the fact that I feel I’ve failed, because I find myself in the same situation or have made the same “mistake”, I now know I haven’t. Like a bird circling, I find myself hovering over the same (seeming) terrain again, but by the very fact that I recognize it, it is not the same.
My awareness is evidence of my evolution.
Maybe in the next spiral I’ll see that terrain coming and, with that foresight, I will shift my flight pattern to glide through the turbulence, or leave the scene altogether.
Another way I trust the longer journey is beyond even this life. Those early years of looking so far back and so far forward have not only inspired my current interest in Futurism), but were also coupled with extensive exposure to and studies in spiritual realms, and have trained me to see beyond this incarnation.
Sedna, the new outer limit of our solar system, seems to be about “our soul’s path of destiny”, as Alan Clay terms it. I’ve been working with him for 5+ years since I first learned of Sedna through his book. It was a great comfort to me, though the Inuit mythology would seem far from comforting. Rather, in seeing myself in her story, I felt affirmed and could let go. Isn’t that what we all need? To be witnessed and known so we can relax a little?
Being here at all, in the midst of all that we humans face, is evidence of trusting the longer journey. Not checking out on living the challenges requires awareness of those wider cycles, that “this too shall pass” as Kirtan Kriya helps us embody.
I have such compassion for younger folks who haven’t yet seen their own patterns unfold more than once. It’s much harder to get a grip when you don’t have a longer view. We so-called elders, or at least olders, are valuable for that perspective and assurance. This too shall pass, whether it’s pleasurable or painful. It’s all in flow, so we might as well let go and appreciate being alive at all, while it lasts.
Or not. From certain views like Bön and Buddhism and Hinduism, the pressure is released by this longer view. Energy is neither created nor destroyed.
The grass is all one grass yet each blade is born, lives and seems to perish within the field. Be your best blade!
Cut through the bullshit and live life fully, as though there is no other, yet look after the longterm as though you’ll be born again into whatever mess or miracles you create in this life. No pressure :) And I mean that - we can ease off the drama when we trust the longer journey. For now I’ll leave you with that multi-dimensional spacetime septapod-embodied puzzle.
The 3rd dream gem on my finger ring of visions was to crawl inside the heads of others and view their true, unedited, and often unvoiced, inner worlds. This desire has cultivated my empathy and ability to be a good actor. But to avoid GBS’s pitfall of deluding myself that I understand you or that I’ve communicated, please feed back to me any sense, or lack of it, you’ve made from this post! I’d love to know what it means to you to trust the longer journey. How do you live this idea? Or how could you?
Thanks for this timely message :) letting go and trusting the journey... easier said than done yet so crucial to our evolution.